He's Making a List...

A bit early for a Christmas post?  That's okay, I don't really do Christmas.  In fact, this post is about something that occurred to me during Rosh Hashanah services at Congregation Adas Emuno not too long ago.  Rosh Hashanah, that's the Jewish New Year, at which time we say:  May you be inscribed in the book of life for the coming year.  It's actually a fascinating metaphor, if you think about it.  In this conception of the divine, God writes down in his book everything that's going to happen to us.  It's all recorded (but not finalized, or sealed, until Yom Kippur).  This complements the idea that God records everything we do, keeps track of it all, and punishes or rewards us accordingly.  A popular Christian corollary is that when you get up to heaven, St. Peter is there at the pearly gates with his book, examines the records of everything you've done, and then informs you of whether you gain admittance to your eternal reward, or are damned to the fires of Hell (or have to endure the interzone of purgatory).  And of course the popular image of Santa Claus is that he too is keeping track of good and bad deeds, at least among children, making a list, checking it twice, gonna find out who's naughty or nice...

The point I'm getting at is that in a literate culture, we are afraid of (at least concerned about) what's being recorded.  The written word is a visual form, and with it comes the notion of divine surveillance.  And literacy facilitates high-level abstractions, so we imagine total surveillance by an all-knowing, all-seeing omnipresent God, and divine record-keeping that accounts for everything that we do.  In contrast, in oral cultures, the anxiety is whether you are being heard or not, whether your deeds go unsung.  The gods are fallible (and sometimes crazy) and can easily miss what you're doing, but that means it's also possible to trick the gods--you might even fool mother nature!

And now that we're in an electronic culture?  Well, there may be a sense that everything we do becomes data that's entered into the heavenly memory banks, but it's not so much about judgment as it is an automatic process--call it karma, which is essentially gigo, the computing acronym that means garbage in, garbage out.  So as for God, it's like he's TiVOing us, but will he ever get around to actually watching what he recorded?  The fear today, then, is that (along the lines of Martin Buber's Eclipse of God) we lost our divine audience (or never had one to begin with)!